Episode 117: Making the News with MSNBC Union’s Amy Hooker & Andrew Joyce

By: Zhubin Parang

Host Zhubin Parang talks to MSNBC Union members Amy Hooker and Andrew Joyce about staying flexible in the challenging newsroom environment, how to handle an election season where unprecedented events happen weekly, and winning a strong union contract that helps them do both of those things as effectively as possible.

Amy Hooker has worked as an associate producer on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes since 2018.

Andrew Joyce is a segment producer with at MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and Alex Wagner Tonight, with over a decade of experience in journalism.

Amy and Andrew both served on the bargaining committee that negotiated MSNBC Union’s recent groundbreaking contract wins.

Zhubin Parang is a co-executive producer and writer on The Daily Show, as well as a former member of the WGAE Council.

Listen here:

---

OnWriting is an official podcast of the Writers Guild of America East. The series was created and is produced by Jason Gordon. Associate Producers are Molly Beer and Tiana Timmerberg. OnWriting’s Designer is Molly Beer. Mix, tech production, and original music by Taylor Bradshaw.

If you like OnWriting, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to rate us on iTunes.

Follow us on social media:
Twitter: @OnWritingWGAE | @WGAEast
Facebook: /WGAEast
Instagram: @WGAEast

Thanks for listening. Write on.

Transcript

Zhubin Parang: You are listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America East. In each episode, you’ll hear from the union members who create the film, TV series, podcasts, and news stories that define our culture. We’ll discuss everything from inspirations and creative process to what it takes to build a successful career in media and entertainment. I’m Zhubin Parang, a co-executive producer and writer on The Daily Show.

Today, we’re joined by MSNBC Union members, Amy Hooker and Andrew Joyce. Amy Hooker has worked as an associate producer on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes for the past six years. Andrew Joyce is a segment producer at MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, and Alex Wagner Tonight, with over a decade of experience in journalism.

Both active union members, Amy and Andrew served on the bargaining committee for the MSNBC Union’s recent groundbreaking contract wins. In our interview, we discussed staying flexible in the challenging news work environment, dealing with an election season where unprecedented events happen weekly, and winning a strong union contract that helps them do both effectively. Okay. Well, I’d like to start out, because you guys are both producers at MSNBC.

Amy, you are a associate producer. You’ve been there for the past six years with All In with Chris Hayes. Andrew, you’re a segment producer at MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow show. A lot of people, I think, probably think that cable news programs, especially like Chris Hayes, and Alex Wagner, and Rachel Maddow have some writing, but a lot of it is interviews, a lot of it is improvised, because you’re answering and responding to questions. Some of it must be improvised, because news happens during the show while it’s going on.

I’d like to, for people who aren’t familiar with how cable news production and writing work, if you guys can take me through a day in a normal episode of a typical program you guys work for, and tell me what your role in that production day is. Amy, why don’t you start?

Amy Hooker: Okay, yeah. I’m, like you said, an associate producer at All In with Chris Hayes. Basically, what I do is I focus on the video aspects. What Andrew does is segment produce. As we get the segment in, I’ll look at the script, look at what the segment producer has written, look at what they would like to have as voiceover, or either a sound bite that they want to play during an interview, and I’ll go and I’ll find those either in our archives, somewhere scouring the internet, in our in-house feeds.

I’ll cut together the video elements you see during the show, and I’ll work together with other editors we have, basically looking through the rundown, seeing what video is going to match the storytelling that the segment producer has written, basically to produce the best show on air.

Zhubin Parang: This is interesting, because I work in a late night, and with the Daily Show, we have a very similar type of script, where the script is basically an interplay between the host talking to camera, the host talking while video is rolling, we call that VT or B-roll. Then we have what we call VT-SOT, which is sound over tape, which is basically when the host stops talking, and then a video clip plays with the sound-

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Zhubin Parang: … And it comes back to the host.

Amy Hooker: That’s my bread and butter.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, our system’s completely different. It’s everything you just said, but we say VO instead of VT.

Zhubin Parang: Oh.

Amy Hooker: That’s right. Yeah, VO.

Zhubin Parang: We can’t understand each other, is what I’m saying. We should probably be separate-

Andrew Joyce: I’m bringing you [inaudible 00:03:10].

Zhubin Parang: Yes, it’s unfortunate, but this is a good conversation while it happened. I guess I’d wrap this up. No, so I think people tend to think of shows like ours, where mostly it’s just the host talking, and then the part where the video plays is not really part of the script, but it’s actually very fundamental to the script.

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Zhubin Parang: When you receive this, you go through the videotapes you want, the clips. I assume research is a huge part of that?

Amy Hooker: Yeah, there’s a lot of research that goes into things. When we’re doing a lot of current events, which in the news today is a lot of current events, it tends to be easier, because we’re hearing Trump talk, we want to see Trump from whatever rally, but when we do a little more deep dive segments, so if we’re doing something about the historical precedent of never having up two presidents since the fifties, the two presidents who had previously had a track record that you can compare apples to apples.

We like to go back, and then that is when the research comes more involved. We’re looking back in our archives, we’re looking at footage, how old we can find old debate footage, if there’s really good, like we said, VO of maybe people back in the fifties voting. We are looking for all of that stuff to really tell the story visually as well as we can. That’s when the research really comes into it is when we tend to do more of the historical aspects. A lot of it is also in terms of research that we want to make sure we found everything.

There’s so much going on while there’s multiple campaign trails, you don’t want to miss the best sound bite from something that had happened, and someone finds it on Twitter somewhere, and then you got to track it down. There’s some research in that aspect as well.

Zhubin Parang: Let’s go back to, let’s say, an APM program that you guys are producing. Tell me how the day begins. You guys have a meeting in the morning, in the afternoon? What time does the day begin for you with, and how does it begin?

Amy Hooker: I think we’re really similar, but I’ll let you take this one because you’re more of the editorial aspect of the rundown in your meetings.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, totally. Our day at, I think both of our shows and most shows, starts with an editorial meeting, and I say the day starts, but really, we’ve been usually spending that morning reading it on the news, thinking about what stories we want to cover, what angles we want to take for how we want to cover those stories. If there’s, like Amy said, a sort of creative historical approach that we could take, or an interesting way to weave certain stories together.

We think about that all, and we bring that to a pitch meeting where the host, the leadership team, our senior producers, executive producers, take pitches from the whole staff about how we should structure the show that day, what kind of guests we could have on, what kind of stories we want to tell, what kind of stories we want to cover. That usually lasts, ours usually lasts like an hour. We come out of that meeting, and the host usually sort of leads the process of determining what pitches they want to take, what stories they want to cover, how they want to then structure what we call a rundown.

I imagine you guys probably call it the same thing, whereas that’s just our sort of run-of-show of what’s going to be our lead story, what’s going to be our next story. Then the managers, the executive producers, senior producers will assign out individual stories to people like me who are segment producers, and that’s when we have to start writing a script, creating a narrative, determining what kind of sound we want to work with people like Amy to find in the archives. That’s, I think, really where, as you’re saying, the writing starts coming together.

I would also say like, oh, we also have to produce the interviews a little bit. I think that people who watch cable news might not realize that when a host is sitting there interviewing someone, it is a more freewheeling part of the cable news production than when they are speaking directly to camera, reading off of a teleprompter. There are still research questions that get drafted, video elements you might play to get a reaction from a guest from. That’s like, in a nutshell, the production period up until broadcast.

Then at broadcast, we sit in a control room, and hope everything goes well, and talk to guests, and check them in, and talk to the host, tell them things, exciting, important things like, “You’ve got two minutes left, you’ve got one minute left, you really have one minute left, you’ve got to go now.” I should say that’s how it is, works on a good day, on a day where you start the day, and you make a plan, and everything stays, you stick with that plan through the end of the day.

It is news, so often what happens is we make a plan at the beginning of the day, and we rip it up an hour later when something breaks and we have to decide we have to cover that. Some days, we rip it up three times, four times before we get to air and we’re still… There are days when you’re still writing scripts two seconds before they’re about to go to air, which can give you-

Amy Hooker: A little bit of anxiety.

Andrew Joyce: … Causes a little bit of indigestion, but also can be a sort of exciting time.

Zhubin Parang: Just because we also have to deal with this, especially during the first Trump administration, we would routinely find ourselves around, we’d have a whole show planned out, then around five o’clock, Trump would trip over a Arlington Cemetery grave or something like that, and that would become national news, and we’d have to scramble to find the video clip and to make a joke about it. When something like that happens, because we, for all the similarities we have, we never have to go live.

We rarely have to go live the way you guys do. If something happens when you have to break in with news coverage, I’d like to know, who decides the story is big enough that we’ve got to break into it? Is anything written at that point, or is that the kind of situation where a host just sort of has to take the reins and improvise?

Andrew Joyce: If it happens during live air, that’s going to be probably the executive producer of the show is going to make a call that says, “All right, we’re live on TV and we have a plan. We’re executing the plan now, but we got to rip it up.” Usually, depending on how much time, and I mean how much time as in, do we have to get to this in one minute versus five minutes?

Amy Hooker: Yeah, 30 seconds versus a minute 45, can you write a quick script? Usually, I think they try to give the anchor something to read off, something to go off, because a lot of times, they’ve just been working on the other blocks, they’ve just been on TV as the news has been breaking, so they’re not exactly caught up. A lot of times, we will try to give them a script and something that they can go off of, rather than them just kind of riffing. I’d say it’s really, really breaking, you’re getting new, like a shooting or something, that’s where the host is kind of-

Andrew Joyce: Learning with you, yeah.

Amy Hooker: … Vamping, and learning the information, talking about everything we know up to the minute. I’d say political news, we tend to try to script a little bit more so the host kind of knows what they’re doing.

Andrew Joyce: This is an anodyne example, but there was a famous baseball player who died during our air a month ago, and I remember there was a sort of like, all right, it was… Was it Willie Mays? I don’t… Everyday [inaudible 00:10:01].

Amy Hooker: The news is turnover. Every day’s a year.

Andrew Joyce: There was a sort of question in like, “Is this news that we need to get on air,” because it’s not necessarily pressing, but it was somewhat important to, and I’m not a baseball person, so I couldn’t tell you this, important to the legacy of baseball, and there was a decision made at the last minute, like, “Okay, we should squeeze this into the show, 90 seconds right here.”

I had to scramble to write a short little biography of this person. Again, I’m not a baseball person, so it was a lot of last minute research, but it’s a thorough process, where I will hammer something out like that. It goes to a senior producer and another person who’s going to fact check it. All that happening in the span of maybe five minutes, and then anchor who reads it cold, live on air.

Zhubin Parang: That’s amazing.

Andrew Joyce: Having never seen it before.

Zhubin Parang: Especially because you’re basically telling me a lot of times, the anchor’s learning this as they’re reading the script out, which is hilarious to me.

Amy Hooker: Yeah, they’re learning the information [inaudible 00:10:55].

Zhubin Parang: How the fact they’re learning as they’re reading it out.

Andrew Joyce: Someone has usually told them in their ear, like, “Hey, so-and-so died and we’re going to go to a script about that,” but they may be reading, seeing the words of that script for the first time as it’s appearing before them in the teleprompter, which I will say also is a real skill for…

Zhubin Parang: Oh, I’m sure. Yeah, it’s good they get some heads up, but they’re not just reading cold, like, Joe Biden drops out of the race. I’m very surprised.

Amy Hooker: They also, our host, Chris, he loves to have a lot of input on what we put into the show. A few, was it like two weeks ago when JD Vance was in the donut shop, and that video was just too good not to play, so we had to get that into the show as much as possible. There’s times where there’s something where it’s like, there’s just something too good not to play that you have to get in there at that point.

Zhubin Parang: That’s fun that, yeah, I imagine that is kind of what makes a host like the host. Their own voice comes through, and what makes a, I assume every, and I’m just spit balling here, that every host has a production team that gradually sort of comes to learn the host voice, and adopts the host, not personality necessarily, but approach and attitude towards what they want to cover. I assume, for example, Rachel Maddow, people who go to pitch to her probably have an idea of how to put in some historical context.

Andrew Joyce: Yes, absolutely. That’s the thing that she likes a lot, or she is really good about focusing on stories that are happening at the state level that might not be picked up nationally. She likes, there’s sort of fewer and fewer of those in the age of Twitter, but every now and then, you’ll find some story that a local journalist have been reporting on in, say, Alabama, or Michigan, or something. Yeah, you get a sense of what kind of stories your host likes.

They don’t accept every pitch that you give them, obviously, but part of this job is making twice as much show as you need, and then cutting things live. It’s sort of like, I assume it’s similar with the Daily Show, but you guys cut it, make your cuts prior to going to air. We sometimes just make our cuts live on air.

Zhubin Parang: We also, a lot of our joke base, this didn’t work, so let’s get rid of it, which I assume it’s not a problem you guys have to worry about. We have the luxury of being able to just not discuss a news story if we can’t find a funny angle on it or something that we deeply care enough about to talk about, and that’s a luxury that we have that you guys don’t, and one of the many reasons why I’m glad that we have my job and not your job.

I do think that it’s funny that people sometimes compare us and what our show does to what you guys do, because in my very humble opinion, we would not be able to do what we do if it wasn’t for you guys. Like news-gathering and reporting is really fundamental to this country’s both democracy and ability to function as an entity that’s aware of what’s going on within it. For us to take all the reporting, and gathering, and research you guys do and make jokes off it is something that I really don’t take for granted.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, and I feel like there’s a whole ecosystem of that. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do, were it not for the reporters of the New York Times and the Washington Post who are out breaking stories and things like that, and they wouldn’t be able to do what they do if it weren’t for publicly funded-

Zhubin Parang: The Wordle, and the [inaudible 00:13:53]…

Amy Hooker: It’s very cyclical, because-

Zhubin Parang: … Thinking of other verticals.

Amy Hooker: Yeah, we need the combination. You’ll watch ours, get the hard news, then we will tune into the Daily Show and we can all laugh about a dig we just saw.

Zhubin Parang: Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. I like to think of us as being part of that ecosystem and not just parasites on it. I do want to ask, because for us especially, the election season’s our most intense time, especially although it’s funny, I said this, because the Trump presidency sort of felt like election year every year with the amount of news that came coming every day.

In terms of this election season and the 2021, if you guys were in the same positions then, do you feel like, is it more intense, is more, do stories come at you at a pace that requires you to change up the process you guys have, or is it the same thing, just faster?

Amy Hooker: I would say it’s the same in terms of all elections are a beast in politics. We have the debates, the DNC that we just had, which was a lot of production turning around, from my perspective, turning around every speech in case we want to play a sound bite later. It’s a lot of quick cutting for that. In terms of this election, I’d say there’s a lot of surprises that are just kind of unprecedented.

Zhubin Parang: Sure, yeah. Oh, like what?

Amy Hooker: We’ve never navigated a place where we expected one person to be the democratic nominee, and then you wake up a day later, and then it’s a completely different candidate that you now need to change your research. We were expecting all this polling to lead for a Biden-Trump race, and now we’re looking at everything from a Kamala perspective.

I think it’s a lot different that we’ve never really had a turn like that before so close to an election, but I think it’s a lot of just still trying to find the best of what you can put on air. That part really hasn’t changed of the production of how you go about it, but I think our mindsets are maybe a little different as we’re kind of getting whiplash from the news.

Zhubin Parang: It definitely, it feels like it is very energizing in the way that it breaks you out of a rut that I think a lot of media commentary falls into during election year, to see suddenly all these changes happening in context that they’d never happened before. A presidential candidate drops out and is replaced. It definitely has felt this election is felt a lot more energizing in a way of what’s going to happen next kind of does that you usually don’t get in election year.

Andrew Joyce: Right. I feel like that this year feels novel, but I feel like we’ve been telling ourselves that every year for the past six years.

Amy Hooker: That’s true.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, it’s weird, I think, that this particular election season, that’s the best I can do to describe it, it’s weird. It’s different in that in previous years, we’ve known what the main stories of the election, the main themes are, I think, far enough out. You have a few of those this year, like reproductive justice I think is a big theme this year. Democracy is a big theme, but there’s also just new things, changing things that happen every day, and it can be a really thrilling challenge and difficult challenge to try and get those on air.

Especially a cable news audience, I think, tends to skew a little older than your general audience. When the Kamala Harris coconut memes and brat memes came out, one of the biggest challenges I’ve had writing I feel like today was trying to explain that in a way that is conveying the news to our audience, in a way that they can use and is understandable, without also trivializing something that by its nature is kind of trivial, but also important.

Zhubin Parang: Yes. That’s a very good point to make, because it feels like social media still feels fairly trivial, even though everyone understands how important it is now to the shaping of the narrative.

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Zhubin Parang: To discuss it in terms of a brat meme, what am I talking about? Yes.

Andrew Joyce: Trying to explain the Tim Walz hat with the Chappell Roan Midwest Princess connection, and telling-

Amy Hooker: There’s a lot of levels of memes that you have to explain first to understand how you get there.

Andrew Joyce: Telling people who spent their whole lives thinking that being called a brat is a bad thing. Suddenly, like, no, no, no, it’s good now.

Amy Hooker: The brat summer, it’s a good thing.

Zhubin Parang: Let me actually, I’m sorry, go ahead, Amy.

Amy Hooker: No, I was just going to say, and also between 2020 to now since the last election we really had, that was also kind of an election that was in its own realm, because we had the pandemic, we were trying to figure out how people were doing mail-in ballots versus people going in early. We had all the footage whenever I go back is people in lines in masks, so it’s very easy to differentiate between that last election and what we’re going through this time.

Then the last time you look before that, it was 2016 when it was Trump’s first time running. I feel like it hasn’t really been normal for a long time. Every one election that we get every four years kind of seems like it’s whole new beast that you have to tackle and kind of see where the world is at that moment, and also what’s changed and what’s still your normal day-to-day.

Andrew Joyce: My first election in this business was 2012, and I think back sometimes to how much time we spent talking about Mitt Romney putting his dog on top of the car.

Zhubin Parang: That’s what I’m saying though, they were so-

Amy Hooker: Right, or Obama’s brown shoes.

Zhubin Parang: … Everything was… Yes. It was also set. It felt like very much like, “We’re just going to talk about this story. Something else will come up. We’ll talk about that for a couple of days.”

It all felt that there are tentpoles in every year, whereas there’s going to be the conventions, there’s going to be the debates, and then there’s going to be like filler silly stories in between those, maybe one or two major news stories would break, some outbreak of a war, or some sort of domestic, either a shooting or some kind of economic crisis, but those would be three or four tentpoles. Now, the last three election cycles, the tentpoles have been just… There’s no tentpole.

Amy Hooker: Right. Exactly.

Andrew Joyce: There’s no room for anyone in the kitchen, it’s just nothing but poles.

Zhubin Parang: There’s no, yeah.

Amy Hooker: In 2016, we were potentially expecting to get our first female president, and now we’re kind of back in that realm. I think, so people had a lot of focus on that in 2016, and so almost so much that it might’ve been a little bit of political blinders, where we had so many people shocked. Then I think people kind of realized not to take anything for granted in the election season.

Zhubin Parang: Yes. I remember we were joking about how when Hillary Clinton came out and this last month in the Democratic convention, she came out to that fight song, and we’re talking about how that is the-

Amy Hooker: Which we don’t want to hear.

Zhubin Parang: … There’s an enormous amount of women, like collective trauma that triggers them for hearing it. Let me actually ask you about, because I was just saying earlier before we talk about the union organizing, every show has the voice of its host. What I was going to ask you is, in terms of your own specific voices, if there’s something you want to talk about, or an issue or a topic that you would like to talk about in a certain way, how do you bring that up?

How much of that gets through? How do you go about, for example, pitching a story that may not be hard news, but maybe an angle on the news that you want to discuss, and how receptive are hosts to that?

Andrew Joyce: That’s a good question. I feel like I just did this week, and I’m trying to think back to how that happened. I think all of the producers will have, we all learn the voice, and the interest, and what the host… It’s an auteur production. The host drives a lot of what stories we cover, but we all also come to it with our own kind of niches and areas that we like to focus on.

One of the recently, on, I do the Rachel Maddow show on Mondays, and then Tuesday through Friday, I do a show with Alex Wagner, and it was during that show, I was pitching on a story that was a little bit weedy about the merger between the grocery store chains, Kroger and Albertsons, and how those two, that grocery store merger was one set to affect grocery prices, but also how the FTC has taken this really aggressive stance against monopoly power in order to try and keep grocery prices low, and also keep just corporate concentration from growing.

I think the way, in order to try and tell that story, which is a little bit complicated, and lives in the world of agencies with alphabet soup acronyms, the best way to do it was to talk about the broader election narrative about what was driving inflation. We did, I think you’re probably familiar with this, we’ve got a bunch of clips of people on Fox News, saying that Joe Biden, that this idea of greedflation and corporations gassing up prices was all BS, and that you shouldn’t believe it, that there weren’t really, it wasn’t corporate greed that was driving inflation.

Then we contrasted that with some of the testimony that came out in one of these FTC hearings from one of the grocery store executives who admits basically in an email, like, “Yes, we are increasing prices more than we need to,” I’m paraphrasing obviously, but it was-

Zhubin Parang: Amazing when people write an email as if they’re having a conversation.

Andrew Joyce: That’s sort of trying to find the thing that connects the story that you’re interested in to the broader narrative that people understand about what is happening in the country is the most important thing. I think that’s what hosts are looking for sometimes also. It’s called television. It’s a visual medium.

Whether or not there are visual elements that you can include to do that kind of storytelling also always really helps, like Fox News clips of people blaming Joe Biden for inflation, or if it’s you’re trying to do a story about climate change, and there’s natural disasters, there’s always this sort of internal debate about whether or not you’re playing into what we call disaster porn, or whether or not you’re using the spectacle of what used to be once in a lifetime weather events that now happen frequently to tell an important story. I know Amy’s host does this very well, I think.

Amy Hooker: I was going to say you took the words out of my mouth. That was what I was going to say is for me, the environment is one of the most important issues, and luckily I work on a show for Chris Hayes, that’s also one of his most important issues, and he loves doing a segment on the environment whenever we can.

It’s hard, especially in the political times when we’re nearing an election, to fit stories in about the environment here and there, but like Andrew said, it is something that’s very visually enticing to the viewer to show them what’s going on in a part of the country where they may not live. When we have wildfires in California, where people on the East Coast may not know what that’s like, or then we show people on the West Coast the hurricanes people on the East Coast are going through.

I feel like that’s a story that Chris tends to like to lead towards. Luckily I have a little bit of my own personal-

Zhubin Parang: That’s a good fit, yeah.

Amy Hooker: … My own personal important issues that he always likes to bring up too. For Chris, he likes to frame it in a way where he has his three young kids, so he always is thinking about the future and their future. He likes to talk about stories that will impact his children. I think it’s a really great show to work on. I’m really pleased that a lot of the times, I get to hear the stories that I would want to be told anyway on the show.

Zhubin Parang: I think to bring us to this topic about organizing, that people who write understand that a very fundamental part of that is the overall conceptualizing of what it is you’re about to say and the context in which you’re about to say it. Not to sound like Kamala, but that is probably the most fundamental beginning of any writing process is like, “How am I framing what I’m about to say?”

A lot of people criticize media because whenever they do, it’s always like, “You are framing this incorrectly. You are framing this the wrong way.” That is always a statement that’s saying, “I want you to say it in the narrative context that I prefer it to be said,” but that’s all writing. Let’s talk about the MSNBC Union. Again, for people who are not familiar with the ins and outs, tell us about how the MSNBC Union first organized and what your role in that was.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, so Union Drive started in, I don’t know if it was 2020 or 2020, I think 2020-

Amy Hooker: Yeah, 2020.

Andrew Joyce: … During the pandemic. I got a call from some people who were talking about union organizing at MSNBC, just having a sort of early conversation about what organizing might look like. They had already talked to the Writers Guild. It was a group of four people, I’m not going to say their names on the podcast. They reached out to me because I had worked at another, I had mentioned to a co-worker that I’d worked at another place in digital media during my short rumspringa outside of the MSNBC walls that had unionized.

I got brought on board by my colleagues in a way that I think that’s generally how organizing works, just the sort of snowball of someone reaches out to you, and then you reach out to someone. It all started during the pandemic, which was weird for us, because normally, I think organizing happens a lot through interpersonal, face-to-face conversations. There was also early on, I think, a question about if MSNBC could fit into this new movement of media organizing.

We’re on the Writers Guild podcast here, so I assume that anyone listening is familiar, at least has some familiarity with the boom in organizing that happened, digital media, but just to dot our I’s and cross our T’s, right? It starts with Gawker in, I want to say like 2014, 2015, and then you see this explosion of these digital media companies organizing in a really, standing up in their workplace and demanding a seat at the table in a way that is inspiring, and I want to say, one of the fastest unionizing industries is media. I think I read that in a Jane McAlevey book.

Zhubin Parang: It certainly speaks to the conditions that were there beforehand about how fast people said, “No, no, I got to unionize.”

Andrew Joyce: Right. I think our question early on was on the one hand, cable news seemed primed for this because we work in this TV industry where there are a lot of unionized people. You guys at The Daily Show were already members of the Writers Guild. The late night staffs were members of the Writers Guild. We had directors who were in the DGA.

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Andrew Joyce: We had stagehand people who were in NABIT or IATSE. There were a lot of people who came from places like Good Morning America, ABC, CBS, where they’ve had, been repped by the Writers Guild for a long time, and they had these unions. On the one hand, everybody had brushed up against someone who was union represented, even if they had never been in a union themselves. On the other hand, cable news has been adjacent to those industries for so long and somehow remained not unionized. We thought there’s got to be a reason for that.

I think part of it is right, that this was, all the big cable news networks began sometime in the 1990s, and probably the nadir of the American labor movement’s organizing power. We existed in this weird space between the old legacy media that had these long-established unions, and the new digital media that was beginning, you’d start a new union labor movement.

In the end, I think it was actually the combination of those two things: younger workers who had worked at digital places that had unionized, and older workers who had worked in TV for a long time, who had been members of unions coming together and saying, “Both of our experiences tell us that this is something that can really materially improve the conditions of our workplace, and we want to go for it.”

Amy Hooker: I feel like a common misconception people had early on was that you’re working in news, so you’ve kind of signed away all your right, you know you’re going to be there around the clock whenever they need you. You don’t have basically any rights. You’ve signed your life away to follow this career that you love. Journalists are really passionate about some of the work they do, so-

Zhubin Parang: You live at the will of the news gods.

Amy Hooker: Exactly. I feel like for a long time, was kind of the belief that it wasn’t necessarily something that would fit in to our daily life and daily work because of the nature of what we do, and how it is all-consuming 24 hours a day, and figuring out, I think, how that fit in and how we could put into a contract how that would work for the many different people we had within our unit was one of the hardest things.

I think that was something we had to tell people along the way is that this is something that we can actually fit into and be a part of. Just because you work in news doesn’t mean that you can’t have these protections in place of working around the clock, or overtime, or any of those types of things.

Zhubin Parang: That’s, I think, a very good point that I think a lot of people who could be in a union or think of themselves as union have this conception of a union as being something that an autoworker in the 1950s has, where union regulates the shifts I come into, the amount of times I can be put on an overtime shift, or what I can do on the shift. They don’t understand that a union contract can be molded and shaped to fit the needs of any workplace.

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Andrew Joyce: Right. We encountered that a lot in our campaign with people who just were like, “I think of unions as for autoworkers and stuff like that.” It was always really helpful to remind them all the New York Times reporters who come on our air to talk about their latest stories are members of a union. All the Washington Post reporters are members of a union. All of the, it wasn’t just…

There were many, I guess I’ll use the word professional class unions, that we interacted with every day that I think helped people understand that a union is for any worker who is below the level of management in their office.

 

Zhubin Parang: Absolutely. Yeah. If there’s anybody out there listening to this who is not already in the Guild, union contract does not mean that you then suddenly adopt auto worker hours. News people want to report the news. You guys don’t want to come in like nine to four with a lunch break and then leave. You guys want to do what you want to do, and you want to serve the job the way the job works. You just want not to have intolerable working conditions as you’re doing it.

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Zhubin Parang: Yeah. What that is depends on the job,

Andrew Joyce: Right. That’s something that I think companies, not MSNBC in particular, but actually a lot of media companies, when they face union campaigns, say to their workers, like, “Oh, well, we don’t want a situation where you can’t pick up a pencil unless you’re a union represented member,” as though anyone has picked up a pencil in a writing job.

I think that sort of getting over that epistemological challenge about what a union is and what it can be was really important to getting workers behind this, and telling people, “We are the ones who will determine what our priorities in a contract are. We are the ones who will negotiate that contract. If you don’t think that certain things that work really well for an auto union can work in the world of MSNBC, we don’t have to ask for it in our contract. We can ask for the things that do work.”

There are many things that exist irrespective of what industry you’re in. Everybody needs enough pay to live in the place where they work. Everybody needs basic protections for overwork and burnout. Every industry I think needs a good plan for how they’re going to cultivate diversity in their workplace, which is something I think unions and the Writers Guild and have been now at the forefront of, which I think is really cool to see.

Zhubin Parang: You guys kept the part in the Ford contract where you get a free Ford car after every year of work, though.

Amy Hooker: Yeah, always.

Andrew Joyce: Exactly.

Zhubin Parang: Everything was great.

Amy Hooker: Always.

Andrew Joyce: I used to think about that. There’s an old saying, and I hate to quote Henry Ford because he was an anti-Semite, there’s this saying in the business world that everybody loves about how Henry Ford wanted to make sure all of his employees could afford to buy the cars they made. My sort of guiding principle as we were doing this campaign was, could a production assistant living in New York afford to pay their rent and purchase a cable package?

Zhubin Parang: That’s the way to do it. That’s a nice way to think about it.

Amy Hooker: Yeah. Also, when we were in the terms of organizing, it was back in 2020 as well, we had talked about the election a little bit in terms of, in organizing in terms of COVID, we were focusing a little bit of our contract also on the newness of what was going on around us. We had provisions in there originally about work from home that was really, really prevalent in 2020, and still is for a lot of people’s lives. We were talking about specific safety measures in the office, hand sanitizing stations, masking stations.

There was a lot of different things that a lot of people had never even thought about in contracts before that we were trying to figure out in real time also, as we were just getting ready in the early stages of what was important. I feel like it was kind of a new for everyone, even if you had done a contract before when we were talking with some of the people, our lawyers on the WGA side, who we would say, “Is this something that would normally happen?” The term was, “We don’t know. This is something that’s new for everyone.”

Zhubin Parang: Let’s find out together. Yeah.

Amy Hooker: Yeah, exactly. We don’t know in terms of work from home what companies are willing to accept. It’s never really happened before where we’ve had this massive movement of corporate jobs move to people’s homes. A lot of people got very either used to the way that was, or it just worked better for their work-life balance. That was something that was also really important that kind of came out of the time we were organizing that was a big focus for a lot of our individuals in the unit.

Andrew Joyce: You mentioned we have to do the show live. That also means that we work odd hours, we work all hours based on the hour of television that we’re producing. That can be a challenge for people trying to commute into the city, trying to find childcare during that time and work from home.

The sort of work from home era which happened because of the pandemic ended up being a real lifesaver to a lot of those people, and they didn’t want to give up some of that flexibility when, and it was a big motivating factor in why they wanted to push for both a union and a strong contract in the end.

Zhubin Parang: Let’s step back and get into this contract, because I just want to finish the part here about organizing. In 2020 during the pandemic, you guys had some conversations about joining, about organizing, and then take me through what happened then.

Andrew Joyce: Then it was pretty much a by the book union campaign, which is a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of making phone calls to people, fewer in-person meetings, because again, it was the pandemic, and eventually, list of, I want to say 200 some MSNBC employees who, this is the thing we did a little differently, decided to put their names to a public petition to say, “We’re asking for recognition.”

By putting our names to it that way, we were, I think, trying to make a bit of a statement that we’re not going to hide behind the anonymity of some number of or percentage of the unit. These are the people in your unit who would like to see a union at MSNBC. Then we went through, again, a pretty standard process for recognition, sans the pandemic part of it.

There was an early debate, not, I think, any of the MSNBC managers were involved in this, but there was a question about how we would vote in our union election, and whether or not we would need to come in to vote in person. This is right after the 2020 election at the height of the pandemic.

Zhubin Parang: Yes. It’s amazing how-

Andrew Joyce: We were arguing that we should be able to vote by mail. I think that the Comcast lawyers, Comcast owns NBC, were just sort of playing by their usual guide, and it’s like, “Well, we prefer in-person elections.” They backed off that pretty quickly, I think. I don’t know why, but I would imagine that at some point, someone at the MSNBC management side said to them, “We have to let them vote by mail because we’re-”

Amy Hooker: We like mail-in ballots.

Andrew Joyce: “We’re making a really big deal on air about how important it is that people be able to vote by mail for their safety. The employees should probably be able to too,” and I don’t want to make it out like they moved quickly on that. They changed their position.

Amy Hooker: Yeah. We had gone for voluntary recognition, as Andrew had said with the list of names. We ended up still going to a vote anyway. Then it was an overwhelming majority of our unit that said yes and wanted to form the union within MSNBC. I think by the time we actually came to the vote, we knew we had the overwhelming support of everyone. I think at that point, we were just ready to get going.

Andrew Joyce: I feel like a lot of people don’t, maybe it’s different if you’re listening, again, to a Writers Guild podcast, you know a lot about organizing, but I certainly learned a lot about how union elections in America work from that process that surprised me. There’s a very specific system for how you have to fill out your ballot, put it in an envelope, put that envelope in another special envelope, all of which I think come from these old laws about union corruption, but which in practice, feel more like, kind of like you would think a voter ID law today.

Amy Hooker: Right, right, right.

Andrew Joyce: It has a logic to it if you just say it out loud or you say that this is the reason we don’t want this, but what it does in reality is make it so that a lot of people’s votes don’t count because they didn’t seal an envelope right, or they put the yellow envelope inside of the white envelope, instead of the white envelope inside the yellow envelope or something.

Amy Hooker: Right.

Zhubin Parang: Yeah, every bureaucratic hurdle reduces the union organizing by that much amount.

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Zhubin Parang: Let me ask you, once you guys did organize, it took a while to actually get the contract done, and I’d like to, the best of you guys can, talk about why it took so long to reach a contract, and what were the sticking points in that?

Amy Hooker: I think, yeah, we were in bargaining for a few years, and a lot of it was because there were certain things we were not willing to budge on at all that were also strong points for the company that the company really didn’t want to change at all. Work from home was one of, I think, our biggest sticking points, where we were hearing from the majority of our unit that this was something that was very important to them, and they needed that flexibility to consist in their life.

Every time we would go to the table with bargaining and present our proposals, that was something that the company really was adamant that they wanted to keep to the company handbook on, and maintain the right to be able to call us back in three days, four days, five days, however much they wanted to as they saw fit. That was something that we knew wouldn’t work for our unit. We knew they wouldn’t vote to ratify that contract if that was what we got at the end of the day. We knew that we had to keep fighting, make concessions on other things here and there, to make sure that we got what was actually important to our union.

It took a long time of talking to the members of the unit. Throughout the bargaining, we were doing surveys, having town halls, hearing from people even as their needs changed throughout the few years of bargaining, what was the most important and what we were not ready to give up. I think that’s why it kind of took as long as it did.

Zhubin Parang: Yeah, that’s interesting. It was sort of dynamic in terms of everyone’s demands on either side, as I assume, pandemic conditions shifted as things changed here and there.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah. I think also, I think that’s a good explanation for why it took as long as it did. I think in explaining why it did eventually, though, why we did get to a first contract, a lot of that is due in part to the Writers Guild and the strike that happened.

Amy Hooker: Yeah.

Andrew Joyce: We inked our contract not that long after the Writers Guild strike ended. I think, again, I don’t want to assume too much about what the motivations, and we are in a time of labor piece, so I don’t want to cast aspersions on-

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Zhubin Parang: Have a nice three years, huh?

Andrew Joyce: I think that there was probably a reasonable expectation after the Writers Guild strike ended and we had not gone on strike, that, “Oh, they don’t have the strike support, that this now is the time,” I think the company was thinking, “Let’s wrap this up.” We started giving a lot more pressure from them to be like, “We’re not moving on these things. We want to get a deal done now.” I think what that misunderstood at a sort of fundamental level was how strike waves happen, and that yes, to a degree, seeing other workers walk out of their workplace and go on strike for better working conditions is important.

It can be a motivating factor for workers in your workplace, but I think what really motivates people is seeing workers win on the picket line. The conclusion of the Writers Guild strike was actually a huge motivating factor for a lot of people in our unit to be willing to take greater action, to at least pledge themselves to taking more drastic steps if we needed to. The company saw that, and we saw some major movements, I think right at the end, in the last-

Amy Hooker: Yeah, in the last two days of bargaining, we saw, it was a completely different contract from the Monday to Wednesday when we were at a tentative agreement. It was a lot of major movement, and I think that the company really did feel the power that our unit had behind it.

We presented them with all the signatures and testimonials of people throughout our unit of what was important to them, why, and why they were willing to stand with us for whatever we said to do whatever, whether it was going to be a contract that we wanted to vote to ratify, if we needed to stay in bargaining, if we needed to strike. We had a lot of people behind us and offering support. In those last few days, I think management really saw that we had the support behind us, and gave in on a few things that they had been holding out on for a while.

Zhubin Parang: Yeah, again, I don’t, not to make this too didactic, but this, again, is another example about how the demands you guys placed were important to the rank and file of your unit. It is important. It was communicated to the negotiators constantly. This is not something where a union came in and said, “Here is a standard contract that you have no say in and you have to abide by.”

We’re a different type of boss. This is fundamentally democratic. You negotiating with management the needs that your rank and file wants and feels critical to the job they want to do for management.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, it was striking how many times at the table we would say things about how the things we were asking for were not only good for us as workers, but we thought good for the operations of the business. I also think a thing that I learned during the bargaining process that was interesting to me is that when you get into the table, I wish we had had a more acrimonious, big fight of a union campaign, because it’d make for better storytelling, but like I said, a lot of our stuff just went pretty by the book in terms of negotiating.

I was struck by, when we were at the table, how much the arguments you make about a specific policy don’t matter unless you have the leverage. Your arguments are only as good as the leverage you bring to the table. You could make the best good faith argument about why this is something that the workers need, why it was good for the business in the long run, why it could be a boon for management, for employee retention, or something like that.

It didn’t matter unless you had the numbers behind you and your workforce ready to stand up and fight for it. The company, like any company, is going to only say yes to the things that they feel like they have to say yes to. It was…

Amy Hooker: Right. For them, it’s easier to stick to status quo on everything. Our original proposals, we spent weeks drafting up all of our proposals from what we had heard from the unit. We had done surveys to rank what was most important to their issues. As we present it, basically, the initial proposals we had gotten back from the company were rejected on most things, and just company handbook as the status quo for what we would want to keep going forward.

We were basically starting from a full head-on of what they just wanted to keep as status quo, pre-unionized, to where we eventually got, they really wanted to keep it as stagnant as long as possible for their benefit. As we were arguing in bargaining sessions for a few years, those are a few years where you’re not getting the benefits of being in the union. We’re having people not getting paid the minimums that we eventually secured for people, and time off and everything. It benefits the company the longer you are in bargaining.

Zhubin Parang: Absolutely.

Andrew Joyce: I think that a lot of people might not understand that that’s a pretty common company approach to a union campaign, that they’re going to give you… From what I heard, at least from Guild organizers who’ve done this over and over again, most companies come to the table and say, “Our first offer is everything we’re already giving you and nothing more,” which is not the worst it can be. Apparently, a company can come to the table and say, “Our first offer is the minimum wage and below everything you’re currently making.”

Zhubin Parang: That was happening with the NBA in the last year, [inaudible 00:46:13].

Andrew Joyce: Right, they want to start back from zero. Under, just a small plug for information, under Project 2025, there’s a rule that says that companies can start below statutory minimums. You could start, you can make your initial payoff for 1 cent, even if the minimum wage is $15 an hour where you’re working.

Zhubin Parang: That’s just a fun tidbit from Project 2025.

Andrew Joyce: Project 2025 Playbook that I got to do something with.

Zhubin Parang: If I’m going to read 900 pages of this thing, I’m going to use it somewhere.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, I think that that was a surprise for me also, that after having had this union campaign and having had this major demonstration about the workers saying, “Hey, we’re here. We just voted in overwhelming numbers for a union,” to then be like, “All right, now we’re starting the clock back again, and it’s going to be another years-long process to get this done,” but ultimately, it pays off in the end, and that’s why people love their unions, and it’s why people do it.

Zhubin Parang: It’s also, again, another reason why so important for people to understand that the demands that they are going to be making as a union body to management have to be demands that are overwhelmingly wanted by the majority of the people, because these are the demands that you are fundamentally saying, “We will go on strike over.”

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Zhubin Parang: You can’t just have somebody come in and just make a bunch of demands you don’t really care about, because that’ll all fall apart in the negotiating table once workers are told, “Will you go to strike over random overtime benefits that don’t really apply to your line of work.” They need to be things that you as a rank and file feel are existential to your job.

That’s more for the sake of the rank and file than it is for management. Management will say no to anything that can say to, but the rank and file need to know this is what, will you go to strike over this? That’s the only, only a yes answer is a list of demands that are worth going to management for.

Amy Hooker: Right. I feel like it’s unique in our company, because like we had mentioned, we do work such different hours. Certain shows do have certain different needs that they would recommend as their top issue for people on that show. People on Morning Joe a lot of times would talk to us about the commuting at three in the morning, and how they felt unsafe on the subways since the pandemic, and how they felt that shift.

They didn’t used to feel unsafe, but now since then, they felt kind of a cultural shift, and now they’re asking either for commuting reimbursement, so they could maybe take a car instead at those hours, or again, the flexibility to work from home. That’s something that we would listen to on a certain show. Another show might really be concerned about working overtime. If it’s like the 11th hour, the last show that’s on our air before we start re-airing, they would sometimes get pulled into late night shows if there was something breaking late at night.

It turns something happens, and we need to do a 1 AM show. We’ll keep those people on later, and then now they have to stay and do a show from 1 AM to 2 AM, and now they have to figure out transportation home. They have to figure out other things. They need to now realize that there’s other issues that-

Zhubin Parang: It’s unique.

Amy Hooker: … They have to figure out. Yeah. It’s unique per show, and that was a lot of our struggle was trying to make the demands work for every show, and put forward the exact list of demands, like you had said, that we would strike over. Someone on Morning Joe might not care as much about an issue that someone on the Maddow Show is facing.

We really had to bring everyone together and make them think of each other as a unit, say, “Think about the PAs who are on your show, your coworkers, the ones who are making the least amount of money in the company. We want to make sure that they can afford a living wage. While that may not be the main priority of you right now, we want to present ourselves strong as a unit. We want to make sure that even if it’s something that might not affect you, you’re willing to say, ‘I’m going to stand with my coworkers.'” That was something we also had to try to bring people together.

Zhubin Parang: I felt this way during the strike. In this day and age especially in our world, this is the most fundamentally democratic action I have ever been a part of.

Andrew Joyce: Absolutely.

Zhubin Parang: As a member of the United States of American citizenry, my participation in our democracy is effectively, I go to vote, and I might donate money. It’s almost nothing else. That, I’m speaking personally here, results in a little bit of alienation and a little bit of detachment from what are supposed to be incredibly important choices and decisions that affect my life. This union and your actions within union require the very hard work of democratic, or of discussion, of giving in to take…

It’s a muscle that I think a lot of us, just by virtue of being Americans, have not really worked. It’s so amazing how this union has suddenly required this and allowed us to build this muscle of negotiating, not just management, but with ourselves to come together in camaraderie, have disagreements, but nonetheless consider ourselves one unit that is working at the expense sometimes of some of us, at the benefit of others, but all the same, considering ourselves a unit. I think that is almost by itself worthy of organizing.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah.

Amy Hooker: For sure.

Andrew Joyce: One of the things we talked about a lot during the early campaign was this concept of workplace democracy, this idea that what a union brings to the workplace is a little more democracy to an institution that has traditionally or not traditionally, because unions have been around forever, but an institution that wants to be top-down by its nature.

Think about this a lot when we’re in election year, where only 18% of the country lives in states that are going to decide this next presidential election. I think you’re absolutely right, that a union is one of the most democratic institutions you can be a part of, insofar as you can see your participation result in material gains that improve your quality of life and change outcomes for you. It does make you, I think, a little more of a sap for democracy.

Zhubin Parang: Yeah, it does, because you see what it really means, in a real sense.

Andrew Joyce: Like, “All right, this is how this is supposed to work. This is how in a perfect world this would work in all of our institutions.”

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Andrew Joyce: It is also, I think it’s the way in which you are seeing a lot of union organizing right now, a lot of energy behind union organizing. We saw it in the last few years from the Writers strike to the would-be Teamster strike that didn’t have to happen, to the UAW strike. You’re seeing a lot of gains made for people at the union level. I don’t think that that’s coincidence that we are having a sort of resurgent moment of labor.

Gallup right now, I think, has union support at some of the highest it’s ever been. We’re seeing that at the same time that the institution of our democracy feels so fundamentally broken. People want an outlet for where they can put their energies, put their willpower and drive behind something that they care about to improve their lives, and actually see it yield results.

Zhubin Parang: Yes.

Amy Hooker: Yeah. Unlike Andrew, I wasn’t on the organizing committee, so I was one of the people who got a call from someone and said, “Is this something that you might be interested in hearing more about, forming a union in your workplace?” Once I started getting the little whispers from people of it’s starting to form, it was something that I have to dive fully into and joined for the bargaining committee.

I’m like, “I’m fully all into this now.” It really does feel like a way to energize yourself and feel like you can actually be involved in, like you said, making a workplace democracy. I feel like I’ve had the most impact of my career from being in the union and being able to help people, having people come to me and tell me what their issues are. I’m still currently a steward in our office, so people will come to me with and tell me what’s going on, and having the support of the WGA, our lawyers have been amazing the entire time.

From everything that seems small to big, they’re always there to help us answer the question. I feel like it’s also been nice to have that sense of support, where it’s outside of your workplace, but you still feel like in your job, you have that security. It felt really nice in a time like this.

Zhubin Parang: Let’s talk about the contract eventually, that you guys won and some of the gains. When it happened, everyone in the Guild got the notice. We were so elated. Looking over it, there’s a lot of just great stuff, the standard stuff about pay raises, about working regulations. There’s one thing that I thought was interesting that I’m not familiar at all with, which was about the six-week on-call rotation schedule.

Andrew Joyce: Yeah.

Zhubin Parang: Tell me about what that is. Tell me about how that affects your workplace, speaking about demands that are unique to your workplace, what that is, and why that was such a good gain.

Andrew Joyce: Amy mentioned this a little bit earlier about sometimes late night teams having to stay late. You think of a 24-hour news network as being 24 hours, but it’s not. There are times of the day that people just aren’t watching the news that often. Late at night, a lot of the cable channels are in taped programming. Evenings, on the weekends is another time that we are in taped programming, but news still happens sometimes during those hours.

There can be a war in Ukraine late at night in America when it’s not as late in Ukraine, or early in the morning, I don’t know. There can be, just to name a recent example, it can be the weekend when we’re in late taped programming, and someone will try and assassinate the former President of the United States.

Amy Hooker: Yep, I was thinking of that exact time.

Andrew Joyce: Then the very next weekend, the current President of the United States will announce that he’s not going to run for re-election. Someone’s got to jump in on those weekends to make the news, where we didn’t have a team in place to do that before.

We used to have this thing called an on-call rotation schedule, where primetime teams like Amy’s and mine would be told every six weeks, you’d be told like, “All right, don’t go out of town this weekend. Be ready to come into the office.” After the pandemic, it became, “Be ready to work from home,” but don’t go see a show-

Amy Hooker: Don’t have a drink.

Andrew Joyce: … Don’t have a drink.

Amy Hooker: Be ready to work.

Andrew Joyce: Be ready in the event something explodes.

Zhubin Parang: Don’t go see a movie, don’t do anything, yeah.

Amy Hooker: Yeah, you have to be ready to answer the phone if you have to.

Andrew Joyce: One of the things we got in this contract that was really great was we eliminated that on-call schedule. Now, in the event that one of those events happens, everyone has the right to refuse the extra assignment, and the company has to entice us to work with extra pay, which still allows the company to do what it needs to do in that moment, which is to get people to come on board and make these shows. We just did those two news events I just mentioned under this new contract, and lo and behold, it worked. The whole system didn’t collapse.

Amy Hooker: Exactly.

Andrew Joyce: Changing that calculation to where you are thinking about your free time as your free time was really important in this era when a lot of people, I think, are really starting to understand that delineation between your work life and your home life, and guarding that barrier between them. It was really important, I think, to a lot of our people to be able to say, “Oh, right, I’m not going to lose one weekend every six weekends anymore.”

Amy Hooker: Right, and I think this is also at times and negotiations where the argument came up of, “This is just news. This is what you do,” and have to come back and say, “Well, we understand that, but we do love news, but this is why we unionized to have these protections in place. We do love it, but we just want to be paid for loving it.”

Andrew Joyce: Yeah, I always thought about that talking point of, “This is just the news industry, this is how it is,” as I actually think that that’s a better argument for our position, right? We want to be able to attract smart and talented people into this industry. This kind of thing is exactly what makes people say, “Oh, I don’t want to do that job for that amount of pay. I’m going to go work in advertising or finance.”

Offering people some minimal protections for things like overwork are what makes it possible to be a news organization that can attract good talent, and can get people into the workplace that are going to want to work hard, and come to their job with the energy that they need, as opposed to someone who’s just stuck there, burnt out, and spent their weekend working extra time for no pay.

Zhubin Parang: I would also imagine, because you guys are in this business because you want to be in this business, that this right of refusal is not because, and what I assume management’s perception of you guys always is that lazy, people don’t want to come into work when they have to.

Andrew Joyce: Right.

Zhubin Parang: You are probably very excited to come into work to talk about the President of the United States dropping out of the campaign, but for people who are in bereavement, for people who are, for whatever reason, unable to leave their family that time, they have the right now to say, “I can’t.”

Andrew Joyce: People who scheduled a family vacation.

Zhubin Parang: A wedding, yeah. You can be like, “I’m sorry, just hold off on the I do so I can go quickly and report on this.” They can now say, “Well…”

Andrew Joyce: It’s not like in the old era they would be like, “You can’t go to that wedding,” but it would be on you, the worker to find someone to replace you in that on-call schedule, which again is like, that’s not the job you signed up for. That’s a manager’s job is to determine what staffing looks like at a time, and that’s why they get paid manager money to do those sorts of things.

Amy Hooker: Right, exactly. It’s one of the things that people were talking about in addition to the six-week rotation is just having people be able to fill in, being fully staffed. That’s a lot of where it came in, extra pay for extra work. You have people on other shows filling in for people, whether it’s the exact same job, or sometimes even taking a step above.

If it was me as an associate producer, maybe stepping up into Andrew’s position as a segment producer, something where there is a pay discrepancy, where the company would tend to use that as a way to initially train people as a next step to their job. After a certain amount of times, the training is no longer training, and it’s just performing that job. That was something we also really wanted to get into the contract was having those options for the company.

We have, in our final contract, they can do 10 days, and then after that 10 consecutive days, they start getting paid at the upgraded title, so they will get paid as for the job they’re doing. It’s something that we heard a lot of people talking about, and when we do have people who have to call out to fill the positions, we had people stepping up. That was a lot of what we had heard from people as well was just being paid fairly for the job they were doing on a day-to-day basis.

Zhubin Parang: On that note, you guys also had a lot of gains made for people on the lower end of the pay scale there.

Andrew Joyce: Right, yeah. I think one of the things we would cite during our contract campaign was this MIT study that determined what a living wage was in New York City. The level that our entry-level workers were making was just below that. Our thought was like, “I understand this is an entry-level job, but you have to be able to live in the city, especially if the company doesn’t want to let us work remotely the whole time. You have to be able to afford to live in the city that you work in.”

If our nation’s best and brightest at MIT are telling us that you can’t afford to live as a single person at this salary, it’s got to change. This person’s a college graduate, almost always at our entry level position. It’s a real job. It doesn’t have to pay the most money in the world. It’s an entry-level job, you’re going to grow in your career, but it should pay the baseline for what it costs to live in the city, or possibly a little bit more.

Amy Hooker: Yeah. Like I had said, we had people coming to us with their personal stories of telling us why they needed the union and why they needed certain things in the contract. From some of our PAs, we heard that they were having to either go back and move in with their parents because they couldn’t afford to live here, or I heard people taking on other shifts and other jobs to just make ends meet.

That’s what we looked at and we’re like, “That shouldn’t be happening within our company where we have the means to pay everyone the wage that they can afford to live here and work here, and not need to take on extra shifts, or go back and live with their parents because they’re not making enough.”

Andrew Joyce: This was sort of another one of those things we were talking about earlier where it was like, we want this to be a business that attracts smart young people. The entry-level is where the person’s first interaction with this company usually, right, is an entry-level job.

If it’s a job that only people can take if they are willing to commute three hours from deep outside the city, or they have a trust fund and they get to live in the city, and it doesn’t matter how much money they make, you’re not going to get a diverse and talented group of people who are going to come up in your company and make good news. That was one of those things where we really hammered the table a little bit about why it was important to us. In the end, the company listened because we had the leverage.

Amy Hooker: I think a lot of it too was providing opportunities for growth for those who are on the beginning of their careers. We have this thing that’s called a writing AP. They’re basically on an associate producer level, but they, for all intents and purposes, do the work that a regular segment producer would do. They just have that associate title because they’re slightly newer.

The company would use that to then keep people at this role and not promote them up. In the contract, we were also able to get language where after a certain number of years in that position, people are able to take a writing test, and if they qualify, they’re able to be advanced to a segment producer rather than an associate producer. Regardless if there’s a position open, they’re able to have that recategorization at least tested at that point.

There’s room for growth, there’s room for the people who are at the entry level of their careers who can stay in the company, because we really wanted, like Andrew said, to foster the best and brightest of the future of news. If we weren’t showing people that there was a way that they could enter into the company and move up, we didn’t think we’d be keeping the best and the brightest.

Zhubin Parang: It’s amazing how so much of this worker development and career growth has to fall on the union, when you think management would be very interested in developing its own skill set and its own skilled labor. That actually is not the case. On the writing side and on the film and television streaming side, a big chunk of the reason we went on strike this last year was over the fact that the management was just not allowing writers to learn the skills enough to give management more ideas for shows and more-

Andrew Joyce: That’s right, we [inaudible 01:04:06].

Zhubin Parang: … More sophisticated work.

Amy Hooker: Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Joyce: You’re right, career development shouldn’t have to fall on the shoulders of the union, but I think it’s such a good example of what a union really is at its core, right? There are the anti-union coalitions in this world, I think will try and tell you that a union wants to destroy a business. They want to suck it dry and make it so that the cost of labor is too high and you can’t actually produce anything. No worker wants to drive the thing that they use to pay their rent into the ground, right? That’s not how it works.

They also, though, workers aren’t stupid. We saw this a lot in the Writers Guild strike or in the contract strike for the TV and film writers was people saying, “We see how much money you’re making, David Zaslav. We see how much money these people are taking in, and we also see how much this position is making relative to what this position made five, 10 years ago, and what kind of opportunities existed then.”

You guys are the TV writers, you know what makes good television, and sometimes upper management, because of, I think, the nature of how business works, their job is to rearrange the business like puzzle pieces, and sometimes lay people off, and sometimes hire people up for a new division.

I don’t envy the challenge of that particular decision. Oftentimes a business, I think, or an industry works better when the people who are on the ground doing it are given the flexibility to say, “We know what works best for this kind of thing. We know what makes good television, what makes a good TV writer, and you need to listen to us.”

Changing the power dynamic in a workplace the way that a union does, so that those people have the ability to advocate for themselves and say, “Hold on. I know you guys are in charge and you run this business, but we have some power too. You can’t make this without us. In fact, we have a lot of the power. We control the means to produce the thing that makes you money. Let us help you,” in a weird way. Yeah.

Amy Hooker: Yeah. Like Andrew said, the workers aren’t stupid. We get the emails from the CEO saying, “Congratulations, everyone. This has been a fantastic quarter. This is our fifth quarter in a row where we’ve seen increases.”

Then you bring that to them and say, “This is what we did for you, so we know you guys are successful. We know that you guys are growing. You have the means to be able to give those who are producing,” like Andrew said, “The product that is doing so successful doing so well, you have the means to pay us the adequate wage to do those jobs.” I think that’s at its core what people were really wanting.

Zhubin Parang: I think that’s a great spot to leave it. Amy and Andrew, thank you guys so much for coming here and talking to us about all the wonderful gains that this contract has given, and what it’s like to work in a finely unionized job.

Amy Hooker: Thank you so much for having us.

Andrew Joyce: Thank you for having us.

Zhubin Parang: OnWriting is a production of the Writers Guild of America East. The series was created and is produced by Jason Gordon. Our associate producers are Molly Beer and Tiana Timmerberg. Our designer is Molly Beer. Mix tech production and original music by Taylor Bradshaw.

To learn more about the Writers Guild of America East, visit us online at WGAEast.org, or follow the Guild on all social media platforms at @WGAEast. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe and rate us. Thanks for listening. Until next time, write on.